My office Is the airplane

No I'm not a pilot. I'm a writer and I always get my best thoughts and ideas when I'm flying. Something about being on air brings torrents of creativity in me. My imagination runs sweet and sour faster when I find myself traveling above cloud level. I really do work better when I'm flying. At the moment, I can't afford to travel as often as I would like but when my next best-seller surpasses the Da Vince code this is what I have in mind to do.

I'll start a new airline and I will call it Sky Author Airways. The fountain pen will be its logo. It will accept as its passengers authors journalists and writers who have published at least one book and want to use a flight as an office space. The decoration will be relaxed, something like a miniature of Google on air. There will be laptops with internet connection to use inside the plane. There will also be a printer and binder to print anything in book format that is downloaded online. This could work in partnership with a major publisher and retailer like Amazon.

There will also be a small library in the luggage compartment below which will be updated based on the passengers' preferences on each flight. Passengers will not be paying on a per travel basis but on a monthly basis. In other words the charge will be the same as renting office space. The only requirement will be that if the flight is booked on the day you want to fly you will have to take another route.

Of course passengers can use Sky Author Airways to combine it with their travel plans but the main goal of traveling with Sky Author is to use it as office space. Instead of working say 8 hours in an office you can take an 4 hour flight somewhere and come back by the end of the work day. Whoever is in the writing or creative business and in need of office space on air will be welcome to use Sky Author Airways!

http://www.thinkaloo.com

Why do we like quotes so much?

I don't like using quotes when I speak. Sometimes the quote is a good fit but it's not your words, you use it to suggest that you read extensively or just want to impress. The truth of the matter is that most people memorize a few quotes to use and never read the original work. "I feel like quoting from books you haven't read is like wearing the t-shirts of bands you've never listened to." Say you read it from me next time you use it :)

http://www.thinkaloo.com

I'm an author and I made this library deal

Yesterday I got the idea to borrow a book of mine from a university library. I had written it 5 years ago. I felt lucky and honored that 2 people in total had borrowed and read it. After all, two is a bigger number than zero, right? Before checking with the library, I had the fear that no one would have read it though I secretly hoped that someone would be out there to disprove me. One of the 2 borrowers, probably the second one to borrow the book, was kind enough to use a pencil and make notes on the side, underline certain passages or put other parts in brackets.

He or she was merciless with the marks so I ended up following easily all traces left on almost every page in my book. But I wasn't getting upset. Ok, initially I was but as I kept following the marks from page to page, I suddenly found it to be a very revealing exercise, if not amusing!

And it just opened up my appetite. I visited as many public libraries there are where I live, looking to borrow more copies of my book so that I could trace more of my readers' marks, compare them and possibly detect patterns in their reactions to my writing.

The experience fascinated me. These days you can get instant reviews on your work online but they bore me. When people write reviews they get into 'review mode', which makes it more probable that you will get an idea of what people think about your book but more difficult to get a real sense of how people felt while reading it.

Besides people tend to exaggerate on reviews, others play the whole work down and often for reasons you can't be sure of. But for someone like me who doesn't believe honest reviews exist, seeing how my readers were marking their reactions as they read my book was quite fun.

So I went to propose this deal to the library people. For every copy of my book that gets returned highlighted, underlined or marked in any way, they will notify me by email and put it on hold for me until I happily replace it with a clean copy for the library. Of course, I get to keep the marked copy.

I figured that if my rate of book markings is 1 book every 5 years, it's definitely worth the cost for I get to keep the traces of my readers' reactions. The library people were naturally happy with the deal.

But so was I!

Now I'm debating with myself whether I should contact more libraries around the world that have my book in their stacks and ask for the same deal...so tempted!

http://www.thinkaloo.com

Online references

Some authors publish blogs about their books in order to promote their work and get feedback from readers. Very few of them, however, post all references online. It would be very helpful if for every book there was a list of links were all references were available to click and read (bibliography, articles, manuscripts etc). Book publishers can make it a requirement that to publish any work in print the author has to make available online all references.

http://www.thinkaloo.com

Reader's Reward

When I buy a book to read, I spend money to buy the author's wisdom, knowledge and thinking process. I reward him for his time and effort. As a reader, however, I also give up my time from doing other activities to read the book. Shouldn't my effort and time also be rewarded? I propose that out of the retail price of any book $1 is discounted at the time of the purchase and the discount is symbolically given the name 'Reader's Reward'. What do you think? Is it fair?

http://www.thinkaloo.com

Can therapy diminish an author's urge to write?

What prompted me to this question was thinking about authors whose books are fiction and auto-psychoanalytical. The themes are always personal obsessions they have which urge them to write about them. The work is never auto-biographical. They write esoteric fiction that reads as very real. They write compulsively, locked in their private space for hours. I wonder if these authors went through therapy and talked about their obsessions whether they might lose the urge to write about them. I'm thinking that if therapy won't diminish an author's urge to write, how it might affect his choice of themes and literary style going forward.

www.thinkaloo.com